As all the world knows, the Large Hadron Collider - the mightiest particle-punisher in the world and possible portal to other dimensions - is shortly to fire up again, following last year's catastrophic liquid helium superfluid explosion.
You can learn that much by following other media outlets like any ignorant drone. But you …

They have already run it at full power...

This phrase needs completion...

I think they should wait until 2012 to fire the beams together, and then get Obama there to push the button, along with contingencies from the WHO and UN while people are queuing up to get vaccinated against avian flu.

nice one chris.

re: @Beer, and @SeanM

I’m not sure what they’re doing, but my screen reader won’t read much… It gives some text, for example on the temperature page, it reads the sections (section 1-2), but that’s about it. I wouldn’t expect something like the "Cryo status" page to work that well (from what I’ve read, its graphic based), but I still would like to see some information.

CERN fail

Yes CERN invented the web but alas its obvious they never really moved past 1994 web site design wise. Says a lot about the quality of their web design team that they need an outside site to navigate their own site. Stupid scientists think they can do everything including coding and graphic design. I love how scientists learn a little bit of code and then go on to write the most unscalable horrid unmaintable bubble gum chickenwire app you would ever imagine and consider themselves a software expert. Hopefully they do their science at a much higher quality and actually get the darn thing to work this time.

Ghostbuster

@asdf

"Yes CERN invented the web but alas its obvious they never really moved past 1994 web site design wise. Says a lot about the quality of their web design team that they need an outside site to navigate their own site. Stupid scientists think they can do everything including coding and graphic design. I love how scientists learn a little bit of code and then go on to write the most unscalable horrid unmaintable bubble gum chickenwire app you would ever imagine and consider themselves a software expert. Hopefully they do their science at a much higher quality and actually get the darn thing to work this time."

Or, perhaps, those web pages are for their conveninece, not yours. Says a lot about scientists that they will go for functional rather than fluffy. Oh, and that's *their* requirements for "functional", not yours.

@LHC Photo

Image reminded me of Time Tunnel

I'm sure many of my fellow commentards will recall Time Tunnel (1966) although I think we got it a bit later in the UK... I just realised that's what the LHC image reminds me of.... Evidence: http://thetimetunnel.com/ttcb.jpg It certainly makes you realise the subliminal influences on the scientists designing the LHC. Google about and there are even similarities in the control rooms: http://www.unmuseum.org/notescurator/timetunnel4th.htm

Enjoy it while we wait...... for something unexpected.

To quote imdb this all sounds eerily similar:

"Scientists Tony Newman and Doug Phillips are the young heads of Project Tic-Toc, a multi-billion dollar government installation buried beneath the desert. They have invented a Time Tunnel, which will allow people to visit anywhere in time and space. While testing the tunnel for an impatient senator, Newman and Phillips became trapped in time, and each week coincidentally found themselves at the site of an important historical event, be it the Siege of Troy, the sinking of the Titanic or an assassination attempt on President Lincoln. Sometimes they traveled into the future, and battled alien invaders. Ann MacGregor, Gen. Kirk and Dr. Swain are the scientists trying to fix the malfunctioning Time Tunnel and bring Doug and Tony back to the present (1968). Written by Marty McKee {mmckee@wkio.com} "

Re: CERN fail

"Stupid scientists think they can do everything including coding and graphic design."

Stupid commentards think they know how CERN's IT stuff is organised. Do you really think there's a physics PhD tapping away at their keyboard and uploading pages to CERN's Web site, thus masterminding CERN's entire Web presence? In fact, there's a bunch of non-scientists doing a bunch of that stuff, including a bunch of people imposing bizarre and perverse constraints on anyone at CERN with their own site. Ever wonder why CERN addresses look like "http://xxx.web.cern.ch/xxx/"? So does everyone working there.

You can criticise the infrastructure people all you like - they were never really very popular - but it has nothing to do with your "stupid scientists" wild goose chase.